Monkey Videos as a Way of Life

Boo, a capuchin monkey owned by the YouTuber Pete Moss, has more than three hundred thousand followers on the site.

Courtesy YouTube

There’s a stage of child development when a child loses any interest in
developing. This manifests in a refusal to eat anything the child
doesn’t want to eat. There are workarounds, involving, for instance,
dipping food in sugary sauces (because what matters, ultimately, is
caloric intake); puréeing or frying everything; distracting the child
with screens. Somewhere during this journey, my wife learned from an
online discussion group that another family had gotten their child to
eat corn by showing the kid a video of a porcupine gnawing on a cob.

I showed it to our son, who was momentarily enthused. (He is easily
distracted by screens.) As he played with some vegetables that had been
formed and shaped into French fries, I began YouTubing random
combinations of animals and food, until I found a video of a monkey
carefully picking toppings off a Domino’s
pizza. In another video,
the same monkey forages through a bag of
fries. He holds each one
aloft, like a torch in a dark cave; the camera zooms in on the monkey as
he peers around the room, chewing his fries in fits and starts. In
another video, the monkey twists
open a bottle of Vitamin
Water and starts drinking it. In yet another, a man presents the monkey
with a watermelon. The
monkey lunges for a large knife, which the man quickly shields him from;
by the end, the monkey is feasting on a large wedge, juice dripping down
his face. At this point, I had forgotten about my son altogether. He was
watching me as I laughed at a monkey dealing with “brain
freeze,” and I was
wondering how the man in the video, with his crackly, warm laugh, had
convinced this monkey, a capuchin named Boo, to trust him.

“We’re gonna set some records with Boo,” Pete Moss, a
forty-five-year-old YouTuber from North Carolina, told me recently over
the phone. “Have you ever seen someone make a thirty-yard putt with a
monkey on their back? Nope. Have you ever seen someone make a half-court
shot with a monkey on their back? Nope.” He adopted Boo about nine years
ago, he said, at the behest of his son, Ty, who is also a professional
YouTuber. (Ty’s videos focus on travel, tech reviews, and skateboarding,
with the occasional cameo from Boo.) Their initial intention, he
insisted, was not to make videos. But Boo loved goofing off whenever a
camera was around, and Moss began uploading videos of him in 2012. Moss
already understood YouTube; he has a separate channel where he pranks
friends and family members, sometimes using laxatives. And he believed
that Boo was special. He talked to his family about devoting himself
full time to building the MonkeyBoo YouTube channel. “I got a chance to
do this,” he told them. “I don’t want to look back ten years from now
and go, ‘What if?’ ”

Moss says the channel’s viewership went up from thirty-five thousand
total views after the first year to more than three million a couple of
years later. He recently commemorated the page’s
three-hundred-thousandth subscriber by feeding Boo sweet-potato
puffs. When I called him,
he was trying to figure out why a recent video of Boo eating a
banana has gotten sixteen
million views, many of them in southeast Asia. “The popularity is cool,”
he told me, but he said that what makes it worthwhile is the fan mail he
receives from people who are going through hard times. “That ranks up
there with throwing touchdown passes for a living, or standing onstage
playing guitar for fifty thousand people. It’s not the dream you have
growing up,” he added. “But the way it makes me feel . . . I can’t put
it into words.”

Moss talks about Boo with a mix of affection and awe. After Moss’s
favorite football team, the Miami Dolphins, lost an early-season game, a
frustrated Boo took off his Dolphins jersey and began wiping the floor
with it; shortly thereafter, the Dolphins went on a six-game winning
streak. “Boo inspired ’em,” Moss joked. He’s careful about never putting
Boo in harm’s way. Although there are videos of the monkey snacking on
junk food, he’s actually on a fairly strict diet, Moss said. And, though
Moss prefers to keep the monkey out of politics, he did conduct a series
of experiments last year in which Boo correctly predicted that a
Republican would become
President. (It’s possible
that Boo simply prefers the color red.)

I asked Moss what the secret is to running a successful YouTube channel.
“Consistency,” he said. He’s also always on the hunt for new ideas. When
I told him that I found his page while trying to feed my child, he said
that he might begin taking online suggestions from parents in similar
situations. Maybe Boo can encourage their children to eat, too. Or maybe
he’ll shoot a video of Boo looking at this article. They are
inseparable—Boo sits next to Moss when he’s editing videos on his
computer—and that’s part of what people watching his videos might not
understand. “That’s a sad thing. I see new monkey channels pop up all
the time,” Moss said. People see Boo’s popularity, but they don’t see
how much work it took to build the relationship at the heart of the
videos. “The bond that me and Boo have, the way we get along, thelove—that is 24/7. Having Boo is not like having a pet, it is a way of
life.”

Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.

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